In my experience the best weight training routines are the ones that you can stick to with consistency and that leave you with a little bit “in the tank” each week to avoid burnout.

Certainly, a full body workout to failure 4 times a week is a surefire recipe for central nervous system burnout – you can expect to lose strength, muscle and probably get pretty ill before your first month is over.

On the other hand, here’s a selection of the sorts of programs for different goals that do work well.

Weight Training Routines for Strength

The goal of a strength program is, quite clearly, to build strength. But what is strength? Well, technically it’s your capacity to produce force. This basically translates into your ability to lift a lot of weight.

Usually, a strength trainee will be getting strong for something. Usually as an aid to athletic performance, strength training in the weights room should be fine-tuned to your ultimate goal – be that rugby, shot-putt or arm-wrestling.

So how is strength built? Well, it’s not as simple as “build bigger muscles”. In fact, that’s a very sub-optimal way of getting strong quickly. While it’s true that larger muscles mean more muscle fibres which means more force production, the biggest factor in your ability to lift weight is your central nervous system.

Most of the day, we never ever use more than about 10% of the muscle fibres of any given muscle. Even in 1-rep-max lifts, we’re using only a small fraction of the muscle fibres available. Effective strength training trains the nervous system, and builds the neural pathways that recruit muscle fibres. If you can go from using 10% of your chest, delt and tricep fibres to 20%, you’ve just doubled your bench press… pretty impressive.

With this in mind, strength training routines should be designed to train the nervous system.

What does that entail? They usually have the following qualities:

-Heavy weight – low reps in the 3-5 range
-Staying WELL away from failure – stopping the set as soon as barspeed slows
-Training FREQUENTLY – i.e. hit each muscle group 2-3 times per week
-Utilise heavy compound lifts (squat, deadlift, bench) and functional movements – e.g. kettlebells and sled-dragging

Stick by these core principles and watch your strength shoot up week after week.

Weight Training Routines for Mass

This is classic bodybuilding fare. The standard bodybuilding model is to train in the 8-10 rep range, go pretty close to failure, and do a split-bodypart workout whereby each muscle gets trained 1-2 times per week.

This is a fairly decent weight training routine for building mass, and if your diet and sleep-schedule are in check, you’ll gain well. One thing I would add is that I’d say in general, bodybuilders probably do go a bit too close to failure. Sure, your goal is to break down muscle fibre, but if you’re benching the same weight week in week out for months at a time, something is wrong. You’ll gain more in the long run by dropping the weight for a couple of weeks and keeping reps in the tank – it’s a good strategy for busting through plateaus.

Another thing to bear in mind is the importance of compounds over isolation. I still maintain that the absolute best bicep-builder is the close-grip chinup, but I may be championing a lost cause. It’s definitely fair to say that most bodybuilders over emphasise isolation with cables and machines, when they could be growing a lot quicker all over with emphasis on squats, deadlifts, pull-ups, shoulder presses, etc. Isolations should be complementary to the “big ones”, not the main event themselves.

Still though, bodybuilding weight training routines as a whole are pretty well laid out in this day and age (as long as you steer clear of muscle mags), and if you get yourself on a basic workout split and eat enough, you’ll be sure to see your muscles grow.